This picture of elementary school students silently protesting gun violence sums up why today's walkouts matter

Students rallying in front of the White House during the school walkout on Wednesday. AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Students all over the country are walking out to protest gun violence after the mass shooting at a Florida high school last month.

In at least one school, even elementary schools are participating.

It shows that even younger kids have to deal with the potential of gun violence, and how mobilized they are in the debate.

On Wednesday, students in thousands of schools are walking out for 17 minutes to memorialize those who were murdered last month at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and to protest the lax gun laws that allowed the shooter to acquire a gun.

Amid the flood of pictures of the protests on social media, one of them stands out. Lois Beckett, a reporter at The Guardian, reported that more than 65 students at an elementary school in Alexandria, Virginia participated in the walkout.

It's a striking demonstration of how even younger kids are conscious of the debate around guns and mobilized against the politics they believe enable school shootings.

School shooting data is hard to come by — the Center for Disease Control and Prevention is legally barred from researching many forms of gun violence — but mass shootings at schools have been common in the United States since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999.

Yet even as shootings increasingly pervade the consciousness of students and schools try to prepare with lockdown drills and prevention measures, few laws have been passed to prevent gun violence. Even after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, which took 27 lives, not a single federal gun control law was passed.

The generation in school now has grown with the potential of gun violence. But the survivors of the Parkland shooting have sparked a movement that argues the status quo is wrong and should be changed.

The nationwide protests today are proof of just how widely their message has resonated. It's mobilized even elementary school students. The protest in Alexandria, according to Beckett, was organized by an 11-year-old girl.

Many of them brought posters for their protest and laid down on the ground as part of it.